


they say the mission to mars is destined to fail

by roguejedi



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Mentioned Iwaizumi Hajime, Minor Character Death, Sportsfest 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 05:23:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19244689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roguejedi/pseuds/roguejedi
Summary: The ship is malfunctioning and the communications system failed. By all accounts, Oikawa Tooru is lost in space





	they say the mission to mars is destined to fail

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the not so distant future so I could have some creative liberty regarding semantics of space travel.

For what felt like the thousandth time, Tooru checked every switch and button and knob on the control panel in front of him. Panic had come and gone about three and a half Earth hours ago, leaving numbness in his fingers, cotton in his mind, and stars light years too far to touch. The silence had become more suffocating than the vacuum his rocket was floating in about one Earth hour ago.  The last contact he had with ground control had been — he glanced at the blinking digital clock — fifteen hours, twelve minutes, and four seconds ago.

An anguished noise left his throat as he pushed off and away from his seat. For a moment, just to forget everything, he let his eyes slip closed. Zero gravity held his exhausted body for him, the weight of it all getting to be too much. Eyelids grew heavy and he figured he wouldn’t miss anything if he were to rest for a bit. Nothing much would happen in space when your co-captain was dead and the communications system was broken.

He remembered the meeting from a year ago when he and Iwaizumi were chosen to be astronauts in Blue Castle 0104’s flight to Mars. This was one of many attempts to get to Mars since the first time mankind touched space, and only one mission was ever successful. Even then, the astronauts hadn’t made it back to Earth.

A few Earth days ago, everything had taken a sick turn. Iwaizumi had gone out to fix something on the outside of the ship and his suit got punctured, the precious oxygen seeping out, and that was it.  His death was short and simple and not at all sweet. Even then, Tooru had to don his own suit to finish fixing it. He had managed to get back into the ship with his face tear stricken underneath the helmet and his right knee in indescribable pain. The body had to be left floating among stars.

Tooru had put on the same charming grin climbing into Blue Castle as he had with his other ships. In the grip of microgravity, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to wear that smile again. What was there to smile about when he was thirty million kilometers away from home and a lifetime away from his best friend? 

A combination of a ghost of pain and incessant beeping made Tooru snap his eyes open and scramble towards the control panel. A crackling from the speaker filled him with bubbling hope. He pressed the square button next to it and spoke, “Oikawa Tooru to ground control. Is anyone there?”

The same crackling noise responded when he took his thumb off of the button. Gritting his teeth, he tried again, “Blue Castle oh-one-oh-four calling. Do you copy?”

Silence. No crackling. No voices.

“Fuck!” He slammed his palm down on the panel, wanting to break it, but his hand hit without any force, away from the buttons and knobs. “Please, please, I don’t want to be stuck here…” He was talking to himself, pleading and begging for anyone’s ears but his own.

The navigator to his left had gone haywire a while ago. He hadn’t bothered to note down the time. There was no point, not when everything he had tried was futile. Tooru was lost in space and his mind. 

Neon blue numbers changed on the clock but he was stuck on how utterly  _ lost _ he was. Several million kilometers away from the nearest planet, he allowed himself to experience despair.

It wasn’t an emotion that he often experienced — or rather it wasn’t an emotion he often experienced as others did. Always, he would twist it into something else. A joke, maybe, or just completely ignored. But joking had abandoned him long ago, perhaps about the same time Earth had.

He named the stars and constellations that he could see from the quartz glass window, the only thing keeping him in the body he’d been given. Tooru felt an odd sort of sad comfort knowing that at least he would likely be written about in history books for trying to get to Mars, even if he never truly made it. At least he saw the stars with his own eyes. Being lost in space really didn’t seem too awful now, surrounded by the very thing he had wanted to be a part of since he was young.

Seventeen Earth hours later, the crackling of the comms gave way to coherent words.

“Ground to Blue Castle, do you copy?”


End file.
